Purgatory
by writeleft
Summary: --post-5.1-- 'I don't understand.'


- - -

'I don't understand.'

Harry has his back turned, pulling on his coat. She sees the small check in his movement and wonders slightly hysterically if he's going to berate her for not knocking, but he does not turn around.

'Given the nature of events, I don't think any of us ever will, now,' he says mildly.

'But she blamed – I mean I saw – I mean she could have – '

The possibility is horrific enough to render her speechless, and she flushes red, stumbles out an apology. He turns towards her, finally. Eyes still down as he fixes the buttons.

'Go home, Ruth,' he says gently. 'The police are done with us now and no one got any sleep last night, remember?'

It seems like aeons ago that they were crowded in here, entertaining an insane conspiracy. She realises that she is turning her ring around her finger as if trying to drive it into the knuckle. Stops, with effort. His hands, she sees, are red from scrubbing where he's cleaned off the blood.

'Where are you going?' she asks, guessing from the grim expression that it isn't home.

'I'm going to see Adam's parents.'

'Isn't that a job for the police?'

Harry grimaces. 'Not when he never quite got around to telling them the whole truth.'

'His parents don't know? Really?'

'Do yours?' he counters. He knows this, of course. He's read her file. But for the sake of safe, polite conversation she lets it slip.

'My mother thinks I'm some sort of liaison for GCHQ,' she concedes. 'Safely behind a desk.'

Briefly she wonders how her mother will hear about Angela. Not from the police; she wasn't quite family. To distract herself from the thought she tries to imagine Adam's parents being content in the belief that their son is safely behind a desk, and concludes that they must be delusional.

'What about Wes?'

'He's with Fiona's parents. Luckily she was sensible enough to get them on side.'

He's moving out into the corridor now, and she grabs her bag and coat to follow him.

'I suppose it is optimistic to think you may be taking my advice.'

'I'm going to see Adam,' she says firmly.

'He's just come out of surgery, Ruth. It'll be hours before he's awake.'

'I know. I just – I just want to see him. Just for a minute. Then I'll go home and sleep, I promise.'

When he stops suddenly she flinches, thinking he is going to argue, to order her not to go. He draws something from his pocket. 'Give him this.'

She puts out her hand automatically and feels something small and warm and hard pass unseen from his fingers to hers. His hand is cool and steady. The touch is brief. She opens her palm and stares dumbly at the object for a few seconds before recoiling. It clatters to the floor with a tiny sound.

For a long moment there is silence. She swallows hard. 'That – that's a bit morbid.'

He bends to retrieve the bullet, and when he straightens looks at her for the first time. His eyes are hard and bright as granite, and suddenly she sees again the man who only a few hours ago pushed her up against a wall and extracted her from the last refuge of self-denial, as if by dragging her into his world he could have her, all hungry eyes and close breath. She can forgive him, of course, for making her admit those shameful feelings. She cannot forgive herself for the rush of adrenalin when she'd thought he was going to lean in and kiss her, because she would have lied again just for that, would have destroyed another ten broken women just for him.

'A reminder.'

He says it precisely, holding the bullet out to her again, but there is enough ambiguity in the pause between words to leave her unsure as to who the reminder is for. His insistence, for all its calm, hints at some sort of desperation, that ritual be completed, gods be appeased. Cheating death is, after all, a serious crime. She does not know if it is the father or the son given strength by the other's shadow, or who is making the sacrifice; who has been spared.

Adam, she thinks, is alive thanks to his dysfunctional, often-abused, trip-wire affiliation with luck. But she saw the gun, the sightlines. Harry was spared by deliberate human error. Try as she might she cannot reconcile Angela with a last-minute suicidal conscience. The death cry still echoes in her head like war drums; _Djakarta is coming_...

'I don't understand,' she says again. It is hard, urgent, every word stressed clearly. A plea for reassurance. Even as the words leave her mouth she knows they are an answer in themselves.

'I think,' he says, suddenly old and exhausted again, 'that was the point.'

She takes the bullet, because she knows that time to recover and a good long holiday are only what she _needs_ Adam to need, to keep him on her pedestal, keep him human. Perhaps Harry knows better. She remembers that flicker of a smile that passed between them, as Harry lied about that committee smooth and cold as marble, for no other reason than the game of it, and she could only stand there trembling and stuttering. Adam, who for a moment was taken in as well, smiling in admiration. Harry, she realised in that smile, used to be Adam. There were depths of understanding there which she does not want to reach.

The lack of sleep is pressing at her now like an insistent hand. Her eyes sting, her skin prickles. From the bus window she thinks she sees something scrawled on the side of a building, and she spins around in her seat, craning her neck, her heart jackhammering. She has to fight the urge to rush back to her computer and trawl through history for explanation, justification, fact. Oh, paranoia. This is how they win.

At the hospital she stands for the minute she is allowed and watches Adam's throat tremble with breath. She thinks of purgatory; dark and shifting shadows, echoes and whispers. Unable to see ahead, unable to comprehend behind, but sure as hell that there's a train coming and you're on the tracks.

Adam's hand is heavy in stillness. She folds the bullet into his palm like a precious jewel. It's blunt and twisted from impact with the pavement, the grooves still faintly grainy with traces of black blood.

There will be time to grieve, she thinks. Time to recover. But she has never felt this uneasy, this uncertain. She isn't at all surprised when the phone in her coat pocket starts to vibrate quietly.

- - -


End file.
